Film4's 100 Must-See Films of the 21st Century

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Drawn from 29 countries around the world, the most recent release on our list is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which stormed into the chart at number 5. Other recent releases in the top 20 include Steve McQueen’s landmark 12 Years A Slave and Jonathan Glazer’s mesmeric Under The Skin. Glazer is one of just a handful of directors with two films on the list – the others are the afore-mentioned Linklater, indie essentials the Coen brothers, US powerhouse David Fincher and of course Austrian auteur Michael Haneke.

Something else we’re really proud of is the mixture of different types of film this list represents – there’s everything from modern teen classics like the Tina Fey-scripted Mean Girls, to massive animated blockbusters like Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s Frozen, to Oscar winners like Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, to austere art-house triumphs such as Kelly Reichart’s Old Joy, to the acutely humane social realism found in The Selfish Giant by Clio Barnard. And much, much more.

The difficulty with these lists is always what gets left off (we're saving documentaries for another list entirely). Our long-list ran to an unwieldy 300+ which we had originally intended to cut down to a top 50 before realising that the 21st century has already generated too much brilliant cinema to represent in any meaningful way with 50 films. So with apologies to the many wonderful filmmakers whose work we were unable to include, we present our list of 100 must-see films of the century so far...